Zanzibar

Getting really lazy...

Keep thinking I should write, thinking about what i could write about...and then, just laying under the air conditioning instead. Back to interviews this week after a few weeks grappling with trying to find archival stuff and visit the municipal council all over again. I did realize recently that half the battle in research here is simply explaining to people what i want to see, which takes an articulation about my own research i usually lack. For example, I finally gave up trying to get documents at the municipal council after the information officer,having indulged me being some earnest white girl coming to do research, told me that the documents are stored in a building that has now been turned into garage where they park the city's cars. He also introduced me to the city council clerk who I asked in a last ditch effort if there were still records from city council meetings in the eighties and he came back after twenty minutes with two crumbling files of payroll stubs from employees that literally started turning to dust in my lap. He proudly pointed at the dates on the files as if he was handing me papyrus scrolls or something. I also gave up after two trips to the Department of Lands and Housing and four trips up nine flights of stairs, when i explained to the woman who was trying to help me what exactly I was interested in looking at and she said, "oh yes, we have all those files in the basement but why would you want to look at that stuff? It smells and is dirty down there." On my way out of that building though on my second trip there, I noticed a sign by the elevator (that I refuse to take due to the frequency of power outages) that mentioned a library. I asked two people behind the counter who had just directed me to come back in a week's time, "oh yes, you can go there if you like." I walked into the room to find (see below) a mass of government documents and boxes waiting for the archives that I could look through freely. I just don't understand what i said to the five people I had talked to in that building that failed to communicate to them that I may want to be directed to the library. The library didn't yield much in the end...but still...its been an interesting process trying to figure out what to even ask for, let alone to find it. Maybe its because I don't know entirely myself...but I think more to the point, it has to do with a bureaucratic culture that prescribes to collective amnesia, where there seems little point to each new generation to keep the files of failed old attempts at governance, especially when there are such bigger fish to fry, like governance itself. Of course, westerners are obsessed with paperwork and put far too much faith in the banality of it all actually explaining things. Who knows. I could try harder...but its just getting so damn hot.

Interview Photos

Mbagala again

If there was one picture so far that I wish I had, it would be of the woman’s face that I interviewed this morning. There was nothing singularly remarkable about it but it was such an evocative and beautifully aged face, one that had lived through so many of the hot seasons that I am currently melting in. One of the downfalls of having to use a translator, among so many, is that often the most eye contact that happens in an interview is between you and the translator, or the subject and the translator. Zubeda though, she looked right at me every time she talked. It took me two hours at least to get home from Mbgala today. My immediate point of reference was driving home to Corvallis from the Portland airport. Snaking, exhausting queues of traffic to go maybe twenty kilometers. Our bus took a back way through a neighborhood on the way out of town and I got to see the utter anarchy of the backstreets…three lanes of cars pushing in one direction as the other side bottlenecks into unseen roads. After sitting for four hours on a wooden stool, I thought I was going to crawl out of my skin so I got off the bus a bit early heading instead to my friend Roxanne’s apartment where I borrowed her swimsuit and slipped into the rudely hot pool as darkness set in and the bats started flying overhead. Finally. I could move my body. Such an amazing and strange day. So much languid physical discomfort juxtaposed against such rich stories. At that moment, the act of getting in the pool, my ability to do that, seemed to cement the vast differences in this world…all of them…just by getting in to the pool. The ability to reflect on difference, to have the data to reflect and the analytical training to do so, makes all the truisms about how everyone in the world is essentially the same feel like a criminal misrepresentation. Yes sure ok we are. But that gets at nothing.
Zubeda doesn’t know when she was born…she knows it was during Yange, a time of famine that Kassim tells me was around 1945. She tells me of marrying and divorcing twice, of moving to the city alone with her first child to live with her brother. Of making mattresses for a living, and having six more children…in total losing all but two out of seven. She tells me about buying her own land and marks all passages of time by who was president at the time and how hard her life was at the time…a historian’s dream…she naturally seems to think of life segmented by major historical events and regimes. It seems so selfish and unscholarly that Zubeda’s life would make me think about my own…the fact that she can’t read or sign her name but she left for the city on her own, made her own money and bought her own land…that I think about those things…and then think for some reason of listening to a song for the umpteenth time on my headphones, utterly entrenched in my own drama of happiness and identity. One is not more noble than the other, nor one more ‘evolved’. Its history though… never I ever been such a champion of my discipline. Is it amazing that the world is small enough now that we can interact and understand each other and maybe learn from each other? Or is it just shameful? Because there is no one I think who would disagree…Zubeda’s life has been hard, and mine has been easy. I’m not trying to bludgeon myself or anyone else over the head with the magnitude of difference in our lives (not just materially…but the way in which we imagine the world and live in it)…in the pool though, inserting Zubeda’s life into different historical patterns and themes…oh, I don’t know…this bird’s eye view while floating placidly, looking upwards…it all sounds so trite. its there though. The difference is palpable, interesting, powerful...something to utterly respect. The difference is an outrage, the difference is a blessing.

Mbagala

This last week has been exhausting in a whole new way. It has been interesting and challenging and tiring…not such a bad combination now that I’ve had a bit of a break from it. Kassim, a farmer and fisherman who lives in an area called Rufiji has become my sometimes research assistant. I think I mentioned him earlier…he has on and off for a few years now assisted a French anthropologist doing research in Rufiji and that is how I was put in touch with him. Many of the people from his region have moved into Dar es Salaam in the past forty or so years and so he set up interviews for me with people living in the neighborhood where his brother lives. These are interviews to ask people about moving into the city, what it looked like when they arrived, how they made a living, how they accessed power and water and got rid of their trash, whether the government has helped the area develop, how often they moved around and how they decided where in Dar they would live when they arrived. This is my first time doing any sort of oral history interviewing and I’ve really enjoyed it. I just wish I was able to do it without a giant language barrier. My Swahili remains nowhere near good enough to do this on my own, and Kassim’s English is enough to convey the main idea of sentences but totally lacks nuance. It is a really interesting process to get to ask people questions about their lives and their history… and while it is their lives and stories to tell, you get to ask the questions and direct the conversation…decide in some ways what is interesting. In other words, ask people questions about aspects of their lives they probably never thought were interesting or significant before.
A big part of the adventure though was simply getting out to Mbgala every day. Mbgala is a neighborhood in the south of the city on the way out of town. “peri-urban” The first day Kassim met me in town and took me out to show me where to get off the bus. You get on a mini-bus in Posta, winding through downtown towards the water past the ferries, sitting in the heat on the bus with the smell of fish filling your head, then snake out of town through enough traffic that sometimes makes the 15 kilometer trip take about an hour or longer… and then the minibus drives on a long, straight road built by the Japanese government with houses and shops crowding all the way up to the street and going back past my line of vision where there seems to be no streets. When we arrived in Mbagala the first day, and well, every day after that, I was quite a spectacle. This isn’t a neighborhood where “wazungu” (white people) come. Everyone stared open-mouthed at me, looking back over their shoulders after they had walked by. Kassim explained to me that some women leaning against their house were gossiping about whether I was Chinese or European. Kassim thought it would be trouble for me to bring my camera in so I don’t have any pictures to show but it was a neighborhood almost completely devoid of roads but rather just had walking pathways between houses. No pavement, just sand, and, while Africa generally lives up to its reputation for being a very colorful place, these concrete houses were all uniformly unpainted as people waited for enough money to paint them. It looked like…a village, I think…houses sort of clustered with communal space in the center of each cluster. Except that houses in the village are made out of mud instead of concrete. People sat around everywhere listening to the radio, women sifted through rice, made mats out of dried grass, or cooked on single propane burners…the men clustered in different areas, the old ones playing a game made out of a wooden board called Mancala.
The men I talked to were not sure what to make of me, but because I was paying them for their time (about six dollars), word got out that it was a good thing to talk to the white woman…I’m not sure what that will mean when I go back next week. Kassim is worried that it may not be safe anymore for us to go in there as word gets out that I am paying people money each time I come in. Its frustrating to face that aspect of things when the experience there so far has been so friendly, hospitable and full of mutual curiosity. So it has been good, the stories interesting…but most of all maybe, I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to step briefly into these people’s lives…begin to get a grasp of what they have been through, how modestly they live and survive, what they think the future may be like. Just talk to these people whose history I claim to be writing? Its only four days worth…but that is world’s more information than never having been there at all. Hopefully in a week when we begin more interviews again I will get a chance to talk to these women too…hear their stories too. (The picture on this post is not of where I was…but an old photograph from the seventies of Dar…but it looks approximately like Mbgala.)

More recycled trash art!

http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/08/01/recycled-trash-robots-lay-waste-to-the-earth/

So no updates for a while now. I feel like I’m still trying to get a handle on being in the archives…what I’m actually going to find, and writing about it seems premature. And really, while this is week two, I lost one day last week to a national holiday and one and a half other days so far to power outages. The power has been going out a lot here. Apparently we’re all waiting for it to start raining…and then there will be power again. Apparently also, when the power goes out, the archivists won’t look for documents. I’m thinking about bringing my headlamp in to see if they’ll use it. If they don’t get documents, I don’t think they do anything except for read a few different daily newspapers, and wait. Wait wait wait. And there’s nothing for me to do but sit and sweat as the temperature rises, waiting. There is so much waiting, and so much tacit compliance with waiting. I wonder if I would be any different. The archivists are nice though, and helpful when they can be but I am basically in the process of just seeing as many documents as I can, and trying to figure out what the hell I am doing. What I’ll be able to do, where to go next, how I should try to make the most out of the limited time I have left. Every day I sit in there feels like my margin of time to figure out if I should be looking elsewhere is getting smaller and smaller. If the power in the archives goes out, where should I go, what should I do with that day, who should I try to talk to… I don’t know yet how to be resourceful but I think the key is simply to start asking more questions. I think the reason people stay for a year for research like this is not because you work for a year…but you figure out how to work and then finally in the last four months…get everything done.
Right now I just don’t know…there’s lot’s of stuff on Colonial town planning and establishing municipal governments, court papers on wives that left husbands and thieves that stole livestock, and committees being formed and called to order…but nothing yet that I can imagine utilizing to tell the environmental history of the city after independence…not much from the sixties on, even less in English (which is an issue i haven't yet solved) from the sixties on…and nothing yet that helps me understand relationships between resources, space, new migrants to the city and municipal government. Not to mention waste, trash and pollution. It is weird to realize when you finally go to the archives that no one has probably ever told you as you trained to be a historian, how to read banal, everyday documents and turn them into a narrative, or to even have the foresight to know to at least collect these documents and take them home, and that later, when you collected more, you’d know what you needed and how to fit it together. I’m enjoying it, but its also makin’ me nervous.

the beach

Fundi Funguo

Sharon, the woman whose house I am living in told me to get a set of keys made last week and I’ve been dragging my feet about it. Actually, I was a little annoyed…I’m the renter, she has a car…I have no clue where to get keys made and she’s probably had to do this before. I started asking the maid in bad Kiswahili where to get keys made and then I moved my inquiry to the streets, walking along the road by my house asking in the shops that look like hardware stores. Finally, I arranged with Godfrey, the askari (guard) for him to go with me today. We got in a bajaj (autorickshaw...see above photo) and went over to Kinondoni, driving on sidewalks as pedestrians darted out of our way seemingly unperturbed, and started asking in different places where the fundi funguo was. Here, people who make things or fix things are called fundi…so you have a clothes maker (fundi nguo), plumber (fundi bomba) electrician (fundi umeme) cell phone repairman (fundi simu) etc. When we finally found it, the shop was more like a slot about four feet wide with at least five people inside leaning against walls or sitting, reading the newspaper. The ceiling was a lattice work of spider webs with an impotent looking light bulb hanging down, and a crooked, photocopied painting of the last supper in pastels hanging in the back. I had to sit on a stool and wait for the fundi to return. The fundi put my keys in a vice and ground the new ones down by hand. I don’t know why I was expecting a key machine. I was expecting one of those hulking, chugging key machines they have at home depot that spits your shiny key out in ten seconds and probably costs more than a house here. Even when we got there I still thought, well, maybe the big key machine is out back somewhere. It was one of those things that once you realize it isn’t there, you immediately realize how preposterous the idea was in the first place…
Godfrey thinks he has malaria and so he left me there and went to the doctor and he looked as if he was waiting for me to give him a few bucks on his way out, which I awkwardly did as I had planned to… then I had to pay for the keys and pay for my bajaj driver to take me home. Money is always an awkward issue here. My natural inclination (and need) is to be pretty cheap. But I also want to be perceived as something other than a wealthy, walking bank when I am in need of the help and guidance from people. Its not that locals are not genuinely hospitable and helpful, but they are also smart enough to know to ask for money for their time. Knowing nothing here, costs money…that’s the just the way it is. Back home, you look things up on the internet, you get on Google maps, you walk into any Wallmart and it has the same Deja vu floor plan. There is very little value placed on local knowledge, very few times you have to ask five people how to get something done, what street it is on, where that street is (nobody knows street names so they have to take you) and when it may be open. Here, it happens all the time. Every little task takes time and money as a foreigner. Not like driving to Home Depot and flipping absentmindedly through home improvement magazines as your key gets stamped out.


Update: Godfrey is back at the house. He has malaria...two different kinds. Geez.

recycled fishes

in homage to all the trash that ends up in the ocean...fishes made out of trash: http://www.gugazine.com/2009/09/plastiquarium/

wrong busses

Spent the day riding buses to wrong places today. I’ve gotten maybe overly calm about this. I got on the bus and realized it wasn’t going to go where I thought it was and decided I’d just see Ubungo once and for all and know where this place is where so many busses go. Forty five minutes later, we had passed out of any area of town I was familiar with, and I realized what a thin line of Dar I navigate never moving far from the coastline and mostly tracing the edge of the city. The bus though went through Kinondoni and Sinza, past miles of the same variety of shops, shuffled into a new order every few miles…used clothing, pharmarcies, plumbers, furniture makers, fruit sellers, cloth sellers and small restaurants…and every once in a while the road elevated enough that I could see down past the front row of shops and into a sea of corrugated roofs fit so close to each other that from above maybe they would all look like crooked roof tiles on the same house. To just ride along on the road and realize I haven’t a clue what’s in there...makes the idea of research seem silly.
I corrected my bus problem by getting a taxi to take me back to where I was originally headed…the UN information centre. I wanted see what sort of stuff they may have in their library. Maybe it was the bus ride, but the UN information centre just seemed so sad. I walked in and wandered the stacks of pamphlets published by the UN in the last twenty or so years. Coffee farming, Sisal farming, “groundwater and society”, “vulnerability and property rights of widows and orphans, women and informal entrepreneurship, … all these 80 page pamphlets floating around here perhaps the only proof of projects proposed or finished. Packed as tightly as those houses. Calling the UN ineffectual is certainly not an original critique …just seemed particularly apt as I tried to thumb though all the skinny little multicolored bindings.
On the way home, on another bus going to the wrong place, it was getting near rush hour and more people were selling things in the street…pillows, apples…my favorite though was a guy weaving between cars trying to sell two copies of a book I just barely saw the title of…Research Methodologies.

Anything wrong with this picture of my bathroom?

Same as it ever was...article on the waste trade actually increasing...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/science/earth/27waste.html?_r=1&hp

Mama Jengo and Sister Epiphania

There is certainly a much wider range of almost mundanely random things that happen here. They are the things I’ll recall for a long time in vague snapshot images. Like taking a Daladala (the public bus…called daladala because it is cheap to ride (sounds like dollar)) with a Korean nun and talking with her in Kiswahili. I found out that she has seven siblings and that her parents died. I wish I knew more. She is off tomorrow morning back to the small village where she is a nurse and there is maybe three cars a day that pass through town. On the daladala we ran into an Indian nun that she knew and we were all standing there hanging on to the railing squished in with a dozen people standing between seats. I went to the university yesterday and Wolfgang, this German professor who has been generously helping me hopefully get contacts and an informal affiliation at the university introduced me to a professor there who does work on slums and urban development. He was very friendly and presented himself as endlessly willing to help but that may reflect a cultural nicety more than it will result in actual assistance. I don’t say that cynically so much as I’m trying to make sure I rely too heavily on the idea that total strangers who are busy with their own lives and responsibilities are going to hold my hand here and help me.
Also, at dinner here at the hostel there is always a string of mostly westerners who come through on their way upcountry (as in, anywhere that isn’t Dar es Salaam) or out of the country and its interesting to hear briefly what they are doing here or how long they’ve been here. I started talking to this French anthropologist (who looks vaguely like David Carradine) the other night, who had been traveling with his daughter to the area where he has been conducting fieldwork on an off for the past twenty years. He told us about his work with communities that live around the national park (I forget which one) and how with the new rules for hunting and fishing in the national park it is impossible for fishermen who live in the village to afford to send their kids to school if they fish legally. This means they are often forced to fish illegally by sneaking into the park at night, and trying to avoid both park rangers and crocodiles. Certainly a problem that conservation has to face, when efforts to preserve nature privileges access to land almost exclusively to foreigners while locals can’t even send their children to school. Anyways, when he heard what I was interested in doing (generally looking at people moving into the city and accessing resources) he told me that many people from the region where he works moved into the city in the sixties and seventies. He called up Hassim, someone who he has worked with in the field for years and arranged for him to come to Dar to introduce me to people I could talk to and interview. Just like that. I called Hassim and talked to him briefly…he knows more English than I know Kiswahili but still it is limited…and we will see where it goes. I guess I have been rewarded by choosing a good place to stay.
Also last night Roxanne invited me (Roxanne is from Berkeley…she is working at a micro-finance bank here) to join her friend Charlene and her at the “Irish Pub” for “Salsa Night” the idea of both of those things (fake irish pub and partner dancing) are things I would studiously avoid back home but the size of the social world here doesn’t really allow for, uh, individually tailored subcultures…so one does things like go salsa dancing.
Roxanne and I planted ourselves firmly on the couch and watched for most of the night but the reason to go these things is to meet people like Raoul. The dangerously tanned Puerto Rican-American here apparently training the Tanzanian army…wearing n a shirt unbuttoned to his navel revealing a snarl of chest hair and two giant gold chains. He had just moved here from Nigeria and before that Iraq, where he taught Turkish and Czech soldiers how to Salsa in the barracks. Or Sean, the lonely bald British guy who works for an electricity company and talked about how his hobby back home is roaming the English countryside with a metal detector, and how, within a weekend they found six thousand metal objects around the outside of a house in some village that had been around for a thousand years. Nice but strange misfits... who I usually try to avoid talking to about what they think of Africa or living here. Its usually pretty predictably cynical in a way that strikes me as very unsympathetic. Cynical in a way that demonstrates that if they ever did commiserate with locals for what is obviously a tough life almost everywhere you look, they long ago stopped really noticing it as much more than a nuisance to their own security and comfort. Is this something that happens when you are here long enough or a characteristic of westerners spending a life in contract jobs in the developing world? All the bleeding heart NGO types though are a different story I suppose. Just trying to parse it all out….

Man collecting recycling

Started up Kiswahili classes yesterday out at Slipway, an overpriced but pleasant place where foreigners go to eat expensive spaghetti and pizza and shop for bejeweled souvenirs. The intermediate class is just me and a Korean nun, Epiphania. I immediately liked Epiphania. She conveys kindness immediately and smiles at every awkwardly executed sentence I say in way that never seems to convey condescension. I am trying to imagine her life. She lives in a small village ten hours away from Dar as a nurse. She has been here for a year and is staying all together for four. Her English is not so good…in fact, I think we can maybe converse best in Kiswahili. Her Kiswahili is pretty limited too, even though it is far better than mine. In October I think she said, she will be working alone at the hospital. Not quite sure what that really means, but I am picturing trying to care for patients when you have a limited ability to even listen to them explain what is wrong let alone tell them what to do. I guess she will probably be fluent before long. Really though for her, it is like learning two languages at once, since her dictionaries and anyone who does teach her or help her is not going to know Korean. Our teacher has been late both days…like two hours. She is old…I was sort of taken aback by how frail and, well, old she looked when she arrived. The other teachers were young and energetic at the other tables and with a job like this, they were probably doing relatively well. Mama Jengo though arrived in these old dusty patent leather heels that looked thirty years old…with what looked like a piece of paper fashioned for an insole. Her dress just sort of hung on her three sizes too big and her neck and face looked like mosquitoes held her hostage every night. Out of her bag comes an endless stream of well-used goods, like scraps of old paper that she writes our lessons on, some clothes and a pair of foldable reading glasses as if space in that large bag was at such a premium that reading glasses needed to be half their normal size.
The teaching is a bit infuriating. It is hard to deny that things here happen slower…and with teaching too there seems to be no premium on efficiency…we wait as she refolds the paper and writes down more words and then we copy them and pass the book for exercises between the three of us. She is a good teacher though and will hopefully save me from terrible kiswahili. Mama J better be on time tomorrow though. Epiphania I can tell is getting a bit perturbed by all this waiting and is liable to lash out real soon. Its going to get ugly.

This blog is about my research and about being in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I study recent urban history and I study trash. The Orwell quote captures most of my fascination with trash, if I am reading it correctly. Orwell wrote it in The Road to Wigan Pier after visiting industrial northern England and reflecting on the poor living conditions of the workers there. I guess I assume that Orwell is presenting a somewhat cynical view of “liberty” that’s nearest synonym may be “capitalism” and therefore reflecting on quite a wide range of “dirt” that necessarily accompanies its various forms. I guess then its easiest to say I am interested in waste and wasting in modern economies and cultures and I think in Africa there are many interesting forms of both to consider…from why there is trash on the street, to governmental waste and corruption, to transnational relationships where Africa is often treated as a wasted continent.

Arriving here for research though tears away much of the security blanket of research questions. My topic is recent, ongoing and ubiquitous...it lacks right now much of a fixed historical point, it is too big to manage and not obvious where to start, especially in a place where i have so little cultural traction. This blog will probably just be pictures for family and friends but maybe it'll also be some sort of research repository as i try to figure things out.